Key information
Dates: Tuesday 23 - Thursday 25 June 2026 | 09:00 - 17:00 (GMT)
Duration: 3 days
Format: In-person teaching with additional pre-programme work and follow-up coaching call.
Fee: £2,995 (No VAT is charged)
Includes all programme materials, breakfast, lunch and refreshments.
Delivered by: Andy Wilkins, Kate Stuart-Cox & Dr Sara Jones
Programme overview
Leaders today face environments that are fast-moving, interconnected and unpredictable. In a world of rapid change and uncertainty, leadership is about creating the conditions for others to shine. Traditional approaches often fall short in such complex situations.
Leadership for a Complex World: Enabling collective brilliance helps you navigate complexity with confidence, harness diverse perspectives, and enable collective performance and innovation.
Through the way that you think, behave and connect with others, you will learn to create the conditions for people to perform at their best. This immersive programme draws on cutting-edge research in leadership to help you empower the collective intelligence of your teams and organisation.
Who is the programme for?
The programme is designed for mid to senior leaders across all sectors who:
- Lead in complex, fast-changing or ambiguous environments
- Want to inspire commitment and collaboration within diverse teams
- Aim to strengthen resilience and inclusion across their organisation
- Are willing to embrace the challenge of self-reflection
- Seek to evolve their leadership practice for long-term, sustainable impact.
Benefits to you
This immersive programme helps you cultivate the awareness, mindset and tools to lead with clarity and confidence when the path forward is uncertain.
On the programme you will:
- Gain practical tools to navigate uncertainty and lead through change
- Build psychological safety and inclusion as drivers of performance
- Learn how to harness diversity of thought to solve complex challenges
- Strengthen your capacity for reflective and adaptive leadership
- Enable a culture of trust, innovation and collective accountability.
Benefits to your organisation
In addition to your personal leadership development and the impact you will make, the programme will help:
- Steer your organisation through complexity and uncertainty through talent development of its people
- Build organisational resilience through your leadership approach and the environment you create
- Have a positive impact on organisational culture and the building of a trusted psychological climate.
Catherine Cullen, Executive Director of Communications and Engagement at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation said:
The programme offered a really fresh perspective on leadership, and the blend of theory and practical tools makes it directly applicable. A really valuable experience.
Focus and structure
This is a highly experiential programme blending theory, reflection and practice. You will learn through a combination of guided frameworks, self-assessments, peer dialogue and real-world application, supported by expert facilitation from Bayes faculty and industry practitioners.
Building on over 70 years of research into leadership, creativity and innovation, the programme bridges academic insight and practical experience. Participants explore how inclusive and adaptive leadership enables individuals and teams to perform at their best — even in the most complex and uncertain environments.
This programme requires a high degree of self-reflection and self-awareness, where you are challenged to identify your personal values, and share past experiences. Through this process you will be able to design environments where trust, creativity and performance can flourish.
An element of pre-programme work is required, prior to attending the in-person sessions.
Pre-programme work
To get the most from the programme, participants will be asked to:
- Read a short article on ‘Problem types in organisations’
- Complete an online questionnaire to assess your personal approaches to problem solving that takes around 10-15 minutes
- Explore your personal values through a structured worksheet and define what your 3-5 core values mean to you.
Day 1:
Day 1 starts by setting the stage for the programme, considering how leading in times of complexity requires people to be more aware of themselves and others than ever.
You will reflect on your own experiences to reveal what it takes to be at your best amid the turbulence of rapid change. Find your ‘anti-fragile’ mode, learn how to access it and understand the implications for leadership.
You will consider individual problem-solving styles using a psychometric tool to reveal your preferences on six approaches to change.
You will explore your personal values (distinct from the values of the organisation you work for) and uncover the potential impact of these. At the end of the day, you will start to create your My Personal Leadership Architecture (MPLA).
Day 2:
Day 2 shifts the spotlight to the more social role of what it takes to lead others – not because of your position or power but because people want to follow you. We explore the question “Why should anyone be led by you?” and share over 30 years of research on what it takes. You will complete a brief self-assessment.
You will focus on leading and interacting with others, through an interactive deep dive into six of the seven factors which drive high performance teams. These include Goal Clarity, Effective Processes, Mutual Accountability, Support, Valuing People and Skilful Interaction.
The day closes with an update to personal reflections and the MPLA.
Day 3:
Day 3 takes on the seventh and most important factor of enabling collective brilliance – that of Trust – aka psychological safety but which we refer to as ‘psychological climate’.
The session will use a unique teaching device developed at Bayes Business School called a Dialogue Sheet to explore the topic of Psychological Climate.
This will be followed by exercises on ways to build and damage the nine dimensions of climate.
Climate tends to be built one interaction at a time – it cannot be mandated with a sweeping policy statement – there are no shortcuts. In this session, we will link personal behaviours back to the three variables of any relationship and encourage people to take responsibility for the climate bubble that they create around themselves from their behaviours.
The programme concludes the three days of in-person sessions by pulling everything together and creating a set of actionable next steps.
The final activity is for participants to share a collective brilliance exercise with each other.
Post programme activity
Optional coaching calls will be scheduled a few weeks after the programme, where you can discuss your progress in applying the learning and work with Bayes faculty to address any areas which require further development.
Learning from experts
Andy Wilkins is a Senior Honorary Visiting Fellow at Bayes Business School, formerly taught on the Bayes Master’s in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership, is a Partner of Perspectiv and a long-term associate of the Creative Problem-Solving Group in the USA (now betterchangetools.com).
Kate Stuart-Cox is a Partner and joint founder (with Andy) of Perspectiv – a professional services firm with expertise embedding innovation, leadership and teamship in organisations around the world.
Dr Sara Jones is Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice at Bayes and former Course Director of the Master’s in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership, with a background of research and teaching in creative human-centred design.
Feedback from previous attendees include:
This programme was challenging and helped me to stretch myself in an area where I wanted to grow. It flowed with a combination of theory, idea sharing and storytelling. It was thought-provoking, reflective and almost uncomfortable at times, but it allowed me to delve a bit deeper into one or two aspects that were bespoke, meaningful and pertinent. It has given me actionable insights, things I can work on straight away.
James Hairsine, Physical Performance Coach, The Football Association
This is thought-provoking and a really good leadership course for busy people. It has helped me take time to reflect on what I’m doing and be more intentional. The course provides an opportunity to think differently and to work alongside people from different backgrounds – it was so interesting and helpful to see other people's perspectives, and it opened my eyes to different sectors, but also very similar challenges.
Naomi Phillips, Director of Policy and Advocacy, British Red Cross
The programme is an opportunity to take time out of your everyday and think about your own leadership practice. It is important when you're thinking about leading an initiative, or leading people, that it has to start with you first, you need to ‘know yourself first’. The programme is for everyone...these processes can be learned.
Trisha Sircar, Global Programme Director, XAXIS
